On February 27, 2015, at 18:00, the National Gallery of Arts and The Department of Eagles have the special pleasure to open to the public in the temporary exhibitions wing the international exhibition “Workers leaving the studio. Looking away from socialist realism,” curated by Mihnea Mircan. The exhibition includes works by Irwin (Slovenia), Armando Lulaj (Albania), Ciprian Mureşan (Romania), Santiago Sierra (Spain), Jonas Staal (Netherlands), and Sarah Vanagt (Belgium), as well as an exclusive selection of works from the collection of the National Gallery of Arts.

According to curator Mihnea Mircan, “This exhibition is an attempt to articulate specific fragments of the collection at the National Gallery of Arts in Tirana and contemporary art projects whose concerns revolve around the notion of realism. It works through two hypotheses about the realism of socialist times, the two ways in which that discourse did not end. The heroic drive in those images, banishing metaphor but having it return as Freudian slip, undermines and corrodes their realist aspirations, and deflates the mimesis of a world ‘to come.’ On the other hand, the relations between artistic freedom and political subservience that underpin socialist realist art production radicalize an equation that contemporary engaged practices must also respond to, even if within a different regime of political interlocution.”

On Friday, February 27, 2015, at 11:00 am, there will be a press conference in the National Gallery of Arts with the curator and curatorial staff of the exhibition.